Social Media Marketing Best Practices from Best Buy

Social Media advice is cheap and for the most part, you get what you pay for. Best practices social media marketing based on experience, well, that’s another thing entirely.

The Social Media Best Practices session at IMS Minneapolis earlier this week gave attendees access to first hand insights from the likes of: Brad Smith from Best Buy, Adam Singer from TopRank Online Marketing, Paul Isakson from Thinkers & Makers (formerly of Space150) and Bryan Person, founder of Social Media Breakfast.

Brad Smith, Director, Interactive Marketing & Emerging Media from Best Buy opened things up talking about a “new marketing reality”. Customers are out there, but they’re bombarded with messages. Customers are not listening to us (marketers & advertisers) anymore. Social media is all about communicating. Customers are listening to each other instead and tuning out marketing messages.

Each company’s journey in social media is different. If your social media consultant starts the meeting with suggestions about starting a Twitter account, leave the room. Treat social media like any other major undertaking with planning, understanding the marketplace, goals and objectives.

Tenents that support Best Buy Social Media Marketing:

Deliver

Blow you away

Never leave you hanging

Make a difference

Make sure you know all we know

Brad makes the distinction of social media tools and the behaviors we seek to engage and influence. “I don’t use facebook, I participate. It’s a two way thing. You’re not half way into social media. When you’re in you’re in.”

Best Buy’s Social Media Marketing Mission:

To connect customers and employees with the Best Buy brand and each other through the right tools platforms and collaboration delivered when, where and how they want.

The focus is on the customer, not the company. “It’s not about what Best Buy wants customers to do, it’s about giving people the tools to connect with each other and employees whenever and however they want.”

Best Buy Social Media Guidelines:

(Essentially don’t be stupid)

Listen

Be findable, think distributed

It’s about people

Enable creation

Make it social

Listen some more

Be authentic

Be transparent

Keep it simple

Make a commitment

Best Buy and Twitter – @Twelpforce
The thing that makes it work is that they didn’t start with a “Twitter strategy”. It was born of a customer need. Best Buy simply leveraged an asset they knew they had with a customer need. Customers needed advice and there are 150,000 Best Buy employees world wide that are already being helpful. Twitter proved to be an effective platform for that. 2,500 employees are signed up to work as part of @Twelpforce.

When Best Buy started their social journey with Facebook, Brad says they were overzealous and promoted commercial messages to the community. The community responded, “not to do that”. Customers want access to the brand, advice, tips exclusive access that others don’t get.

Best Buy Learnings From Their Social Media Experience:

Listen first, talk second

Its OK to fail

The same social mores apply online as offline

Customers don’t care about channels

We have to be ready ro respond

Customers will tell us and everyone else where our organization is broken. And expect a fix

People are forgiving

Overall Best Buy is treating their social media experience as a journey and have learned the importance of listening instead of pushing. It’s an impressive example, not only of a very large brand finding value in a humble and transparent, customer focused social media effort, but one of true Minnesota ingenuity when it comes to new technology and marketplace innovation.

I did miss some of the bulleted items above because the presentation went by very quickly. If access to the PowerPoint presentations is made available, I’ll link to it from this post.